High-profile Dem Miller to address GOP

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WASHINGTON — Georgia Sen. Zell Miller, the highest profile Democrat to endorse President Bush for re-election, will speak at the Republican National Convention later this summer, a congressional aide said Friday.

According to the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Miller will give his address on Wednesday night of the convention in New York. The Bush-Cheney campaign was expected to make an official announcement later in the day. The convention will be held Aug. 30-Sept. 2.

The speech by Miller, a former two-term governor, comes 12 years after he delivered the keynote address for Bill Clinton at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, also held in New York.

Miller, who is retiring in January, has voted with Republicans more often than his own party and has been a key sponsor of many of Bush’s top legislative priorities, including the Republican’s tax cuts and education plan.

In May, Miller spoke at the Georgia Republican convention and criticized Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry as an “out-of-touch, ultraliberal from Taxachusetts” whose foreign and domestic policies would seriously weaken the country.

“I’m afraid that my old Democratic ’ties that bind’ have become unraveled,” Miller said.

In 2001, Miller had told a Georgia Democratic Party gathering that Kerry, the four-term Massachusetts senator and decorated Vietnam War veterans, was “an authentic” American hero who had worked to strengthen the military.

Miller’s recent book, “A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat,” is now a national best-seller. In it, he assails members of his own party, including Clinton.